Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 52 страниц)

“I want you to whop this goddam thing off,” she said.

Roland shook his head. “We’ll give it a little longer to heal on its own.”

“Why?”

“Cutting on a sore’s a bad idea unless you absolutely have to do it. Especially out here, in what Jake would have called ‘the boondogs.’”

She agreed (without bothering to correct his pronunciation), but unpleasant images crept into her head when she lay down: visions of the pimple beginning to spread, erasing her face inch by inch, turning her entire head into a black, crusted, bleeding tumor. In the dark, such visions had a horrible persuasiveness, but luckily she was too tired for them to keep her awake long.

On their second day in what Susannah was coming to think of as the Hide Camp, Roland built a large and rickety frame over a new fire, one that was low and slow. They smoked the hides two by two and then laid them aside. The smell of the finished product was surprisingly pleasant. It smells like leather, she thought, holding one to her face, and then had to laugh. That was, after all, exactly what it was.

The third day they spent “making,” and here Susannah finally outdid the gunslinger. Roland sewed a wide and barely serviceable stitch. She thought that the vests and leggings he made would hold together for a month, two at the most, then begin to pull apart. She was far more adept. Sewing was a skill she’d learned from her mother and both grandmothers. At first she found Roland’s bone needles maddeningly clumsy, and she paused long enough to cover both the thumb and forefinger of her right hand with little deerskin caps which she tied in place. After that it went faster, and by mid-afternoon of making-day she was taking garments from Roland’s pile and oversewing his stitches with her own, which were finer and closer. She thought he might object to this—men were proud—but he didn’t, which was probably wise. It quite likely would have been Detta who replied to any whines and queasies.

By the time their third night in Hide Camp had come, they each had a vest, a pair of leggings, and a coat. They also had a pair of mittens each. These were large and laughable, but would keep their hands warm. And, speaking of hands, Susannah was once more barely able to bend hers. She looked doubtfully at the remaining hides and asked Roland if they would spend another making-day here.

He considered the idea, then shook his head. “We’ll load the ones that are left into the Ho Fat Tack-see, I think, along with some of the meat and chunks of ice from the stream to keep it cool and good.”

“The Taxi won’t be any good when we come to the snow, will it?”

“No,” he admitted, “but by then the rest of the hides will be clothing and the meat will be eaten.”

“You just can’t stay here any longer, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? You hear it calling. The Tower.”

Roland looked into the snapping fire and said nothing. Nor had to.

“What’ll we do about hauling our gunna when we come to the white lands?”

“Make a travois. And there’ll be plenty of game.”

She nodded and started to lie down. He took her shoulders and turned her toward the fire, instead. His face came close to hers, and for a moment Susannah thought he meant to kiss her goodnight. He looked long and hard at the crusted sore beside her mouth, instead.

“Well?” she finally asked. She could have said more, but he would have heard the tremor in her voice.

“I think it’s a little smaller. Once we leave the Badlands behind, it may heal on its own.”

“Do you really say so?”

The gunslinger shook his head at once. “I say may. Now lie over, Susannah. Take your rest.”

“All right, but don’t you let me sleep late this time. I want to watch my share.”

“Yes. Now lie over.”

She did as he said, and was asleep even before her eyes closed.

Ten

She’s in Central Park and it’s cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky, but she’s not cold. No, not in her new deerskin coat, leggings, vest, and funny deerskin mittens. There’s something on her head, too, pulled down over her ears and keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the cap off, curious, and sees it’s not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, but a red-and-green stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS.

She looks at it, startled. Can you have déjà vu in a dream? Apparently so. She looks around and there are Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare and she realizes she has in her hands a combination of the caps they were wearing in some other dream. She feels a great, soaring burst of joy, as if she has just solved some supposedly insoluble problem: squaring the circle, let us say, or finding the Ultimate Prime Number (take that, Blaine, may it bust ya brain, ya crazy choochoo train).

Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

Both have cups of hot chocolate, the perfect kind mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream.

“What world is this?” she asks them, and realizes that somewhere nearby carolers are singing “What Child Is This.”

“You must let him go his course alone,” says Eddie.

“Yar, and you must beware of Dandelo,” says Jake.

“I don’t understand,” Susannah says, and holds out her stocking cap to them. “Wasn’t this yours? Didn’t you share it?”

“It could be your hat, if you want it,” says Eddie, and then holds out his cup. “Here, I brought you hot chocolate.”

“No more twins,” says Jake. “There’s only one hat, do ya not see.”

Before she can reply, a voice speaks out of the air and the dream begins to unravel. “NINETEEN,” says the voice. “This is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT.”

With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by the smell of ash

(wednesday)

and leather. She sees Eddie’s lips moving and she thinks he’s saying a name, and then

Eleven

“Time to get up, Susannah,” Roland said. “It’s your watch.”

She sat up, looking around. The campfire had burned low.

“I heard him moving out there,” Roland said, “but that was some time ago. Susannah, are you all right? Were you dreaming?”

“Yes,” she said. “There was only one hat in this dream, and I was wearing it.”

“I don’t understand you.”

Nor did she understand herself. The dream was already fading, as dreams do. All she knew for sure was that the name on Eddie’s lips just before he faded away for good had been that of Patrick Danville.

Chapter V:

Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane

One

Three weeks after the dream of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more woods below. One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more sled than travois.

Oy raced back and forth between Roland and Susannah, as if keeping a constant watch. His fur was thick and sleek from cold weather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the three of them were currently covering might have been a meadow in the warmer seasons, but now the ground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, because their way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worst was over. And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad—at least, not yet. There was plenty of game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire, and on the four occasions when the weather turned nasty and blizzards blew, they had simply laid up and waited for the storms to wear themselves out on the wooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did, although the angriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more took to the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on the ground. In the open places where the shrieking nor’east wind had been able to rage fully, there were drifts like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tall pines almost to their tops.

After their first day in the White Lands, with Roland struggling to pull her (and then the snow had been less than a foot deep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months crossing those high, forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snowshoes, so that first night she’d set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error process (“By guess and by gosh” was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger pronounced her third effort a success. The frames were made of limber birch branches, the centers of woven, overlapping deerskin strips. To Roland they looked like teardrops.

“How did you know to do this?” he asked her after his first day of wearing them. The increase in distance covered was nothing short of amazing, especially once he had learned to walk with a kind of rolling, shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the latticed surfaces.

“Television,” Susannah said. “There used to be this program I watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Sergeant Preston didn’t have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he did have his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the guy’s snowshoes looked like.” She pointed to the ones Roland was wearing. “That’s the best I could do.”

“You did fine,” he said, and the sincerity she heard in his simple compliment made her tingle all over. This was not necessarily the way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for that matter) to make her feel, but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature or nurture, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“They’ll be all right as long as they don’t fall apart,” she allowed. Her first effort had done just that.

“I don’t feel the strips loosening,” he told her. “Stretching a little, maybe, but that’s all.”

Now, as they crossed the great open space, that third pair of snowshoes was still holding together, and because she felt as though she’d made some sort of contribution, Susannah was able to let Roland pull her along without too much guilt. She did wonder about Mordred from time to time, and one night about ten days after they had crossed the snow-boundary, she came out and asked Roland to tell her what he knew. What prompted her was his declaration that there was no need to set a watch, at least for awhile; they could both get a full ten hours’ worth of sleep, if that’s what their bodies could use. Oy would wake them if they needed waking.

Roland had sighed and looked into the fire for nearly a full minute, his arms around his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them. She had just about decided he wasn’t going to answer at all when he said, “Still following, but falling further and further behind. Struggling to eat, struggling to catch up, struggling most of all to stay warm.”

“To stay warm?” To Susannah this seemed hard to believe. There were trees all around them.

“He has no matches and none of the Sterno stuff, either. I believe that one night—early on, this would have been—he came upon one of our fires with live coals still under the ash, and he was able to carry some with him for a few days after that and so have a fire at night. It’s how the ancient rock-dwellers used to carry fire on their journeys, or so I was told.”

Susannah nodded. She had been taught roughly the same thing in a high school science class, although the teacher had admitted a lot of what they knew about how Stone Age people got along wasn’t true knowledge at all, but only informed guesswork. She wondered how much of what Roland had just told her was also guesswork, and so she asked him.

“It’s not guessing, but I can’t explain it. If it’s the touch, Susannah, it’s not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although… do you believe we have dreams sometimes we don’t remember after we awaken?”

“Yes.” She thought of telling him about rapid eye movement, and the REM sleep experiments she’d read about in Look magazine, then decided it would be too complex. She contented herself with saying that she was sure folks had dreams every single night that they didn’t remember.

“Mayhap I see him and hear him in those,” Roland said. “All I know is that he’s struggling to keep up. He knows so little about the world that it’s really a wonder he’s still alive at all.”

“Do you feel sorry for him?”

“No. I can’t afford pity, and neither can you.”

But his eyes had left hers when he said that, and she thought he was lying. Maybe he didn’t want to feel sorry for Mordred, but she was sure he did, at least a little. Maybe he wanted to hope that Mordred would die on their trail—certainly there were plenty of chances it would happen, with hypothermia being the most likely cause—but Susannah didn’t think he was quite able to do it. They might have outrun ka, but she reckoned that blood was still thicker than water.

There was something else, however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She knew, because she could now feel it beating in her own head, both sleeping and waking. It was the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now. She had no idea what they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got there, but she found she no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was to see it. The idea of entering it was still more than her imagination could deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that. And she thought that seeing it would be enough.

Two

They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland’s heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again. Bright blue holes sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at work, constantly pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from horizon to horizon, and had a low full look both of them now recognized. More snow was on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst they’d seen. The wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to numb all his exposed skin (after three weeks of diligent needlework, that amounted to not much more than his forehead and the tip of his nose). The gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past them and then on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully.

Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except once, in the outland of Mejis), grunted. He knew what would be beautiful to him: decent cover when the storm overtook them, something more than just a thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when the latest gust of wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band, stepped out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her. Dressed in hides from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a man.

“What do you make of that?” he asked her.

The wind kicked up again, harder than ever, at first obscuring what he had seen. When it dropped, a hole opened above them and the sun shone briefly through, lighting the snowfield with billions of diamond-chip sparkles. Susannah shaded her eyes with one hand and looked long downhill. What she saw was an inverted T carved in the snow. The cross arm, closest to them (but still at least two miles away) was relatively short, perhaps two hundred feet on either side. The long arm, however, was very long, going all the way to the horizon and then disappearing over it.

“Those are roads!” she said. “Someone’s plowed a couple of roads down there, Roland!”

He nodded. “I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it. I see something else, as well.”

“What? Your eyes are sharper than mine, and by a lot.”

“When we get a little closer, you’ll see for yourself.”

He tried to rise and she tugged impatiently at his arm. “Don’t you play that game with me. What is it?”

“Roofs,” he said, giving in to her. “I think there are cottages down there. Mayhap even a town.”

“People? Are you saying people?”

“Well, it looks like there’s smoke coming from one of the houses. Although it’s hard to tell for sure with the sky so white.”

She didn’t know if she wanted to see people or not. Certainly such would complicate things. “Roland, we’ll have to be careful.”

“Yes,” he said, and went back to the tow-band again. Before he picked it up, he paused to readjust his gunbelt, dropping the holster a bit so it lay more comfortably near his left hand.

An hour later they came to the intersection of the lane and the road. It was marked by a snowbank easily eleven feet high, one that had been built by some sort of plow. Susannah could see tread-marks, like those made by a bulldozer, pressed into the packed snow. Rising out of this hardpack was a pole. The street sign on top was no different from those she’d seen in all sorts of towns; at intersections in New York City, for that matter. The one indicating the short road said

ODD’S LANE.

It was the other that thrilled her heart, however.

TOWER ROAD,

it read.

Three

All but one of the cottages clustered around the intersection were deserted, and many lay in half-buried heaps, broken beneath the weight of accumulating snow. One, however—it was about three-quarters of the way down the lefthand arm of Odd’s Lane—was clearly different from the others. The roof had been mostly cleared of its potentially crushing weight of snow, and a path had been shoveled from the lane to the front door. It was from the chimney of this quaint, tree-surrounded cottage that the smoke was issuing, feather-white. One window was lit a wholesome butter-yellow, too, but it was the smoke that captured Susannah’s eye. As far as she was concerned, it was the final touch. The only question in her mind was who would answer the door when they knocked. Would it be Hansel or his sister Gretel? (And were those two twins? Had anyone ever researched the matter?) Perhaps it would be Little Red Riding Hood, or Goldilocks, wearing a guilty goatee of porridge.

“Maybe we should just pass it by,” she said, aware that she had dropped her voice to a near-whisper, even though they were still on the high snowbank created by the plow. “Give it a miss and say thank ya.” She gestured to the sign reading TOWER ROAD. “We’ve got a clear way, Roland—maybe we ought to take it.”

“And if we should, do you think that Mordred will?” Roland asked. “Do you think he’ll simply pass by and leave whoever lives there in peace?”

Here was a question that hadn’t even occurred to her, and of course the answer was no. If Mordred decided he could kill whoever was in the cottage, he’d do it. For food if the inhabitants were edible, but food would only be a secondary consideration. The woods behind them had been teeming with game, and even if Mordred hadn’t been able to catch his own supper (and in his spider form, Susannah was sure he would have been perfectly capable of doing that), they had left the remains of their own meals at a good many camps. No, he would come out of the snowy uplands fed… but not happy. Not happy at all. And so woe to whoever happened to be in his path.

On the other hand, she thought… only there was no other hand, and all at once it was too late, anyway. The front door of the cottage opened, and an old man came out onto the stoop. He was wearing boots, jeans, and a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. To Susannah this latter garment looked like something that might have been purchased at the Army-Navy Surplus Store in Greenwich Village.

The old man was rosy-cheeked, the picture of wintry good health, but he limped heavily, depending on the stout stick in his left hand. From behind his quaint little cottage with its fairy-tale plume of smoke came the piercing whinny of a horse.

“Sure, Lippy, I see em!” the old man cried, turning in that direction. “I got a’least one good eye left, ain’t I?” Then he turned back to where Roland stood on the snowbank with Susannah and Oy flanking him. He raised his stick in a salute that seemed both merry and unafraid. Roland raised his own hand in return.

“Looks like we’re in for some palaver whether we want it or not,” said Roland.

“I know,” she replied. Then, to the bumbler: “Oy, mind your manners now, you hear?”

Oy looked at her and then back at the old man without making a sound. On the subject of minding his manners he’d keep his own counsel awhile, it seemed.

The old man’s bad leg was clearly very bad—“Next door to nuthin,” Daddy Mose Carver would have said—but he got on well enough with his stick, moving in a sideways hopping gait that Susannah found both amusing and admirable. “Spry as a cricket” was another of Daddy Mose’s many sayings, and perhaps this one fit yonder old man better. Certainly she saw no harm or danger in a white-haired fellow (the hair was long and baby-fine, hanging to the shoulders of his anorak) who had to hop along on a stick. And, as he drew closer, she saw that one of his eyes was filmed white with a cataract. The pupil, which was faintly visible, seemed to look dully off to their left. The other, however, regarded the newcomers with lively interest as the inhabitant of the cottage hopped down Odd’s Lane toward them.

The horse whinnied again and the old man waved his stick wildly against the white, low-lying sky. “Shut up ya haybox, ya turd-factory, y’old clap-cunt gammer-gurt, ain’t you ever seen cump’ny before? Was ya born in a barn, hee-hee? (For if y’wasn’t, I’m a blue-eyed baboon, which there ain’t no such thing!)”

Roland snorted with genuine laughter, and the last of Susannah’s watchful apprehension departed. The horse whinnied again from the outbuilding behind the cottage—it was nowhere near grand enough to be called a barn—and the old man waved his stick at it once more, almost falling to the snowpack in the process. His awkward but nonetheless rapid gait had now brought him halfway to their location. He saved himself from what would have been a nasty tumble, took a large sidle-hop using the stick for a prop, then waved it cheerily in their direction.

“Hile, gunslingers!” the old man shouted. His lungs, at least, were admirable. “Gunslingers on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, so y’are, so ya must be, for don’t I see the big irons with the yaller grips? And the Beam be back, fair and strong, for I feel it and Lippy do, too! Spry as a colt she’s been ever since Christmas, or what I call Christmas, not having a calendar nor seen Sainty Claus, which I wouldn’t expect, for have I been a good boy? Never! Never! Good boys go to heaven, and all my friends be in t’other place, toastin marshmallows and drinkin Nozzy spiked with whiskey in the devil’s den! Arrr, ne’mine, my tongue’s caught in the middle and runs on both ends! Hile to one, hile to t’other, and hile to the little furry gobbins in between! Billy-bumbler as I live and breathe! Yow, ain’t it good to see ya! Joe Collins is my name, Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane, plenty odd m’self, one-eyed and lame I am, but otherwise at your service!”

He had now reached the snowbank marking the spot where Tower Road ended… or where it began, depending on your point of view and the direction you were traveling, Susannah supposed. He looked up at them, one eye bright as a bird’s, the other looking off into the white wastes with dull fascination.

“Long days and pleasant nights, yar, so say I, and anyone who’d say different, they ain’t here anyway, so who gives a good goddam what they say?” From his pocket he took what could only be a gumdrop and tossed it up. Oy grabbed it out of the air easily: Snap! and gone.

At this both Roland and Susannah laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but it was a good feeling, like finding something of value long after you were sure it was lost forever. Even Oy appeared to be grinning, and if the horse bothered him (it trumpeted again as they looked down on sai Collins from their snowbank perch), it didn’t show.

“I got a million questions for yer,” Collins said, “but I’ll start with just one: how in the hell are yers gonna get down offa that snowbank?”

Four

As it turned out, Susannah slid down, using their travois as a sled. She chose the place where the northwestern end of Odd’s Lane disappeared beneath the snow, because the embankment was a little shallower there. Her trip was short but not smooth. She hit a large and crusted snow-boulder three quarters of the way down, fell off the travois, and made the rest of her descent in a pair of gaudy somersaults, laughing wildly as she fell. The travois turned over—turned turtle, may it do ya—and spilled their gunna every whichway and hell to breakfast.

Roland and Oy came leaping down behind. Roland bent over her at once, clearly concerned, and Oy sniffed anxiously at her face, but Susannah was still laughing. So was the codger. Daddy Mose would have called his laughter “gay as old Dad’s hatband.”

“I’m fine, Roland—took worse tumbles off my Flexible Flyer when I was a kid, tell ya true.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Joe Collins agreed. He gave her a look with his good eye to make sure she was indeed all right, then began to pick up some of the scattered goods, leaning laboriously over on his stick, his fine white hair blowing around his rosy face.

“Nah, nah,” Roland said, reaching out to grasp his arm. “I’ll do that, thee’ll fall on thy thiddles.”

At this the old man roared with laughter, and Roland joined him willingly enough. From behind the cottage, the horse gave another loud whinny, as if protesting all this good humor.

“ ‘Fall on thy thiddles’! Man, that’s a good one! I don’t have the veriest clue under heaven what my thiddles are, yet it’s a good one! Ain’t it just!” He brushed the snow off Susannah’s hide coat while Roland quickly picked up the spilled goods and stacked them back on their makeshift sled. Oy helped, bringing several wrapped packages of meat in his jaws and dropping them on the back of the travois.

“That’s a smart little beastie!” Joe Collins said admiringly.

“He’s been a good trailmate,” Susannah agreed. She was now very glad they had stopped; would not have deprived herself of this good-natured old man’s acquaintance for worlds. She offered him her clumsily clad right hand. “I’m Susannah Dean—Susannah of New York. Daughter of Dan.”

He took her hand and shook it. His own hand was ungloved, and although the fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his grip was strong. “New York, is it! Why, I once hailed from there, myself. Also Akron, Omaha, and San Francisco. Son of Henry and Flora, if it matters to you.”

“You’re from America-side?” Susannah asked.

“Oh God yes, but long ago and long,” he said. “What’chee might call delah.” His good eye sparkled; his bad eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest. He turned to Roland. “And who might you be, my friend? For I’ll call you my friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I’d belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick.”

Roland was grinning. Was helpless not to, Susannah thought. “Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of Steven.”

“Gilead! Gilead!” Collins’s good eye went round with amazement. “There’s a name out of the past, ain’t it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you must be older’n God!”

“Some would say so,” Roland agreed, now only smiling… but warmly.

“And the little fella?” he asked, bending forward. From his pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of déjà vu. It brushed her mind like a wing and then was gone. “What’s your name, little fella? What do they holler when they want you to come home?”

“He doesn’t—”

–talk anymore, although he did once was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bumbler said: “Oy!” And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with Jake.

“Good fella!” Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into Oy’s mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd’s Lane and Tower Road.

“I’ll be damned,” Roland said mildly.

“So won’t we all in the end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam,” Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy’s paw. “But not today. Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it’s warm and we can palaver over a cup of coffee—for I have some, so I do—or a pot of ale. I even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine, especially with a teensy piss o’ rum in it, but who knows? I ain’t really tasted nuffink in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia’s done for my taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro’, what do you say?” He regarded them brightly.

“I’d say that sounds pretty damned fine,” Susannah told him. Rarely had she said anything she meant more.

He slapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don’t know if that’s Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t—

“Arrr, Lippy, goddam what used to be yer eyes, where do you think you’re going? Did yer want to meet these folks, was that it?”

His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that seems the exclusive property of people who live alone except for a pet or two. His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the ugliest quadruped she’d seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind—not in one eye but in both—and scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recall: the slithering sound of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones.

Collins might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded almost defensive. “Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as she is, I don’t reckon you’ll be winnin many beauty contests yourself!” He patted the horse’s chafed and sore-looking neck, then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.